Objects don’t mean much in America. When a thing breaks, it’s usually discarded and a replacement bought. Things are disposable.

So when Eleanor Briggs of Hancock is walking through Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, and sees a pair of pink flipflops, the harnesses many times repaired, with the soles worn thin by the shape of the owners feet, it speaks to her.

“I kept running into objects that had just a strong presence. They spoke so eloquently of the person that owned them and the life they had,” said Briggs in an interview Monday. “It’s so unlike our culture, where if something has cracks or gets broken, we throw them away. They can’t do that in Myanmar. They need to extract the last ounce of utility. It’s very poignant and speaks to a whole part of the world that has to get by on not much.”

Two of Briggs’ photography series, “The Presence of Things,” are currently on display at the Jaffrey Civic Center’s annual Spring Show, which encompasses both photography, paintings, multi-media work and textiles.

Briggs chose two photographs from her 30-photo series. Both show beds that she found in Myanmar. One, a bed that she slept on while in the country, with a crowd of gourds spilling from under the bed and sprawling across the floor. The other is the bed of a night watchman whose job is to watch over the star tortoise, an endangered species which was once highly sought after for the Japanese pet market. Now, they are protected, but must still be guarded during the night hours to make sure that they are not poached.

“I thought they went together, and I thought they might be more interesting to people that could only see two pieces of the series,” said Briggs.

Another artist who pulled from a previous series is Anne Gay Hartman of Peterborough, who submitted two oil paintings: “Running Brook,” from a series of paintings that reworked black and white images taken by photographer Ansel Adams, and “August Garden” from a series of Hartman’s depicting garden scenes.

Hartman said she has been painting for years, but has settled down to put more effort into her painting since moving to Peterborough four years ago, picking up classes at the Sharon Arts Center. She works mostly from photographs, she said, usually taken by herself. It was interesting to work from images that she had not taken herself, she said, while working on her Ansel Adams series. Sometimes she would add or delete elements, or focus on a particular portion of the image, but tried to keep the strong elements of her fellow artist, such as the composition of the image, intact in her own rendition.

Hartman said that in the past few years, she’s been experimenting with using a pallet knife instead of a brush while painting. “Running Brook” was done almost exclusively with a pallet knife, she said.

“I find I like working with that very much,” she said. “It gives you a lot of freedom.”

“August Garden” was painted half with the pallet knife and half with brush, said Hartman. It depicts her own backyard garden in Easton.

In the upstairs gallery, where the paintings and three-dimensional art are on display, Sue Norton of Jaffrey also submitted two pieces to the show. Norton specializes in art that uses multi-media, she said in an interview Monday.

“Any one thing is boring,” she explained. “I want to be able to pick and choose from my world around me.” Some of her pieces are directly inspired by that world, she said, such as her multi-media piece “Who Tells the Truth,” which she began after she got tired of noticing how often people used dishonesty around her, especially during her work.

“I was fed up with the continual lying. They were lying as easily as they were telling the truth,” she said. So Norton embarked to research what the truth meant to different people, conducting both interviews with people and digging into the information available online. The piece is layered with meaning. The whole thing is encased in Plexiglas, representing the many overlapping layers of what truth means to people. One of her interviews suggested that all people are guided by a moral compass, so a compass appears behind the glass. Another friend, when asked about the truth, wrote a poem about what it meant to her, and that too, became part of the piece. Other parts, said Norton, simply struck her while she was researching online: A particular quote, or a bumper sticker that simply rang “true” to her.

Her other piece, “Hallelujah,” is a collage, using many overlapping layers of pinks and purples, with a lot of waving lines. Movement was the main inspiration for how the collage came together, said Norton.

“While I was doing it, the rhythm seemed to flow. I had a strong feeling of movement and rhythm,” she said. Often when working on a piece, she focuses on a single topic, and as the collage formed, she decided it had a feeling of “Hallelujah.”

“When we hit a rhythm, sometimes it’s a Hallelujah. It’s usually a spiritual moment, kind of like the ‘Aha!’ moment. When we get to that Hallelujah, there’s always been movement of some kind. Usually moving forward, but sometimes we get our Hallelujah’s by moving backwards, and leaning from our mistakes.”

The show will run through Saturday March 22. Photography is on display on the first floor of the Jaffrey Civic Center, with multiple mediums of art on display in the Cunningham Gallery on the upper floor. For more information, visit www.jaffreyciviccenter.com.

Ashley Saari can be reached at 924-7172 ex. 244, or asaari@ledgertranscript.com. She’s on Twitter @AshleySaari.